How The Skies Weep
( Strange Weather )


Ozzrick was no riddle. Generally, he liked to think of himself as a man of few contradictions and little to hide—he loved what he loved, despised what he despised, and was very clear and open about his feelings and intentions with regard to both and everything in between along his path forward in life. His approach to faith, however, was perhaps the most difficult to define, rife with what at least some would consider simultaneously incompatible philosophies.

On the one hand, he believed in everything.

For the full span of his memory, stretching back into early childhood growing and traveling with his troupe, family by association, he had always collected souvenirs of religious culture. Trinkets from here or there. A statuette from this village, an emblem from another, a lucky pendant at a third claiming to attract the positive energies of the universe. He listened to tales of gods and goddesses, spirits, and nature.

Some maintained very individual and personal approaches to their faith, making these unique to the person who held it, and more private and internalized. Others practiced more communal faiths on a scale that swept nations and, at least in that aspect, could serve as a unifier for people. Common ground. Some held their faiths very deeply and close to their hearts. Others practiced more as ritual or social culture with only light personal ties. And the place on each spectrum that any given person fell varied.

Ozzrick sampled everything, but devoted himself to none. Unlike most everyone he encountered, he carried religion much less as a form of personal identity and more like a collection of cloaks, interchangeable and adaptable to whatever environment he was in such that he could display whichever look made those around him most comfortable. But at all times, he carried all with him still, even if they were not on visible to the watching audience.

Thus, when it came to events looked upon by those about him as ‘divine intervention’ or a ‘sign from the gods’, he tended to privately maintain a slightly different opinion about the matter at hand, ranging anywhere from completely dismissing its relation to anything, to wondering what forces were at play.

After the third day of rain in Oba, Ozzrick had to admit his thoughts were now in the latter category.

The Tyrant’s hull gave a low creak as an inward bound swell slapped wetly at her side. The air about him was gray, dim with a thick rain, and his eyes — cast out over the water and angled to the hundreds of thousands of tiny dents, splashes, and overlapping ripples that licked the upper surface of the slower, rolling sea waves — were unfocused as scene before him. He couldn’t have said how long he’d been standing there, but the rain had long since soaked his hair and attire to their saturation limit, the beads of it now hitting and skittering down his body, finding no portion which could be any wetter. His mind was elsewhere.

If the vast stretches of Oba’s desert sand were not immediately visible from his current vantage point, it might have been difficult to remember his current location. It didn’t rain in Oba. Sporadically yes, of course. But to many adult Obans, memories of rain were just that: scattered memories of the few instances in their lifetimes that they had experienced it.

This was unheard of, and unprecedented. Some areas, by the latest word he’d received, were even experiencing flooding.

Ozzrick frowned, rivulets of wet trickling down the furrows of his brow before he squinted upwards, to the roiling storm overhead. He didn’t know what to make of it, or what forces to blame. And, though he didn’t subscribe rigidly to any single faith, that did not mean he held none, but rather his was a convoluted and malleable one. However difficult to define or categorize, it was very real, and his fingers by instinct found one of the pendants hanging at his neck, the pad of his thumb tracing its familiar shape and texture.

Then: “Wet enough yet, are you, captain?” came inquiry under the ever present rush of rain sound, and Oz lowered his gaze from the heavens back to the mortal plane—and his first mate. Bhrasha looked as drenched as he, the droplets like dew on her ebony skin where she stood in the center of the deck before approaching.

Oz grunted, and adjusted his lean against the rail. “Not quite yet, I don’t think…” he said after a moment. “And you?”

Bhrasha came to a quiet standstill at his side, her arms unwinding from a fold across her chest to hang loose at her sides. “It’s strange…” she admitted at length in a more reserved tone than he’d come to expect from her. “I can’t seem to stop standing in it.”

He eyed her only a brief period longer before averting his gaze. “I’ve never seen anything like it here. Of course I’ve experienced my fair share of rain but not…not like this. It must be all the stranger to see the oddity in one’s homeland.”

For the space of a few seconds, there was nothing but the rush and wind in the air between them. Bhrasha’s expression was as distant as Oz imagined his was before her arrival. But then, when she did speak, it was as though she were pulling herself from a dream, back to the moment. “You should invite your new friend out into it. He can have his swimming lessons on two feet in this weather.”

Unphased by the change in subject, Oz chuckled and took it. “I should. I’m sure he’d prefer it to the traditional method, in any case…”

From there, their conversation casually devolved into the usual — crew, their route, the implications of storms on departure times — but in the back of his mind, Oz’s subconscious was still turning over the oddity of the surrounding natural events.

Unbeknownst to him at the time, his curiosities were only subject to deepen as in the coming days it would become clear as word traveled: theirs was not the only portion of the world experiencing unprecedented natural phenomena. Quite the opposite.

Word Count: 1,044